Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Haaretz is a very good paper

He just posted this a few minutes ago:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

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Republican Judges are very often afraid to do the right thing. They go out of their way to show they are totally impartial, to the point of making really bad and unfair decisions. Their counterparts, Judges appointed by Democrats, like Biden or Obama, laugh at the stupidity of it all. They go out of their way to follow the party line, they don’t give the opposition a chance. Such a difference — It is so SAD to see!

Benny Morris

Last night a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico near Eagle Pass, Texas.

U.S. Border Patrol agents knew that a group of six migrants were in distress in the river but could not try to save them, as they normally would, because troops from the Texas National Guard and the Texas Military Department prevented the Border Patrol agents from entering the area where they were struggling: Shelby Park, a 47-acre public park that offers access to a frequently traveled part of the river and is a place where Border Patrol agents often encounter migrants crossing the border illegally.

They could not enter because two days ago, on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent armed Texas National Guard soldiers and soldiers from the Texas Military Department to take control of Shelby Park. Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass, posted a video on Facebook showing the troops and saying that a state official had told him that state troops were taking “full control” over Shelby Park “indefinitely.” Salinas made it clear that “[t]his is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city.”

The Texas forces have denied United States Border Patrol officials entry into the park to perform their duties, asserting that Texas officials have power over U.S. officials.

On December 18, Abbott signed into law S.B. 4, a measure that attempts to take into state hands the power over immigration the Constitution gives to the federal government. Courts have repeatedly reinforced that immigration is the responsibility of federal, not state, government, but now, according to Uriel J. García of the Texas Tribune, “some Texas Republicans have said they hope the new law will push the issue back before a U.S. Supreme Court that is more conservative since three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined it.”

On January 3 the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the new law, saying: “Texas cannot run its own immigration system. Its efforts, through S.B. 4, intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens, frustrate the United States’ immigration operations and proceedings, and interfere with U.S. foreign relations.”

Abbott and MAGA Republicans are teeing up the issue of immigration as a key line of attack on President Joe Biden in 2024, but while they are insisting the issue is so important they will not agree to fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion until it is solved, they are also unwilling to participate in discussions to fund more border officers or immigration courts. Today, once again, Biden reminded reporters that he has asked Congress to pass new border measures since he took office, but rather than pass new laws, Republicans appear to be doubling down on pushing the idea that migrants threaten American society and that an individual state—Texas, in this case—can override federal authority.

Abbott has spent more than $100 million of Texas tax dollars to send migrants to cities led by Democrats. These migrants have applied for asylum and are waiting for a hearing; they are in the U.S. legally. In September 2023, Texas stopped coordinating with nonprofits in those cities that prepared for migrant arrivals.

Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker wrote to Abbott, calling him out for choosing “to sow chaos in an attempt to score political points.” Pritzker noted that Abbott is “sending asylum seekers from Texas to the Upper Midwest in the middle of winter—many without coats, without shoes to protect them from the snow—to a city whose shelters are already overfilled with migrants you sent here.” Chicago’s temperatures are set to drop below zero this weekend, Pritzker wrote, and he “strongly urge[d]” Abbott to stop sending people to Illinois in these conditions. “You are dropping off asylum seekers without alerting us to their arrivals, at improper locations at all hours of the night.”

Pritzker wrote that he supports bipartisan immigration reform but “[w]hile action is pending at the federal level, I plead with you for mercy for the thousands of people who are powerless to speak for themselves. Please, while winter is threatening vulnerable people’s lives, suspend your transports and do not send more people to our state. We are asking you to help prevent additional deaths. We should be able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to urge Congress to act. But right now, we are talking about human beings and their survival. I hope we can at least agree on saving lives right now.”

Speaking on the right-wing Dana Loesch Show last week, Abbott said, “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

On January 13, 1833, President Andrew Jackson wrote to Vice President–elect Martin van Buren to explain his position on South Carolina’s recent assertion that sovereign states could overrule federal laws. “Was this to be permitted the government would lose the confidence of its citizens and it would induce disunion everywhere. No my friend, the crisis must be now met with firmness, our citizens protected, and the modern doctrine of nullification and secession put down forever…. [N]othing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad,” he wrote.

Reaping The Harvest
I want to flag This post from Barak Ravid, writing in Axios. Much of it is important detail on a general story you know if you’ve been following things: The Biden White House is out of patience with Benjamin Netanyahu. While Biden’s steadfast support for Israel has been transformative within the broader Israeli body politic, Netanyahu himself is still the same man: taking everything offered with pro forma gratitude and stiffing most things, if not everything, asked in return.

This is anything but surprising. We’d be wrong to imagine the White House is terribly surprised either. Joe Biden knows this man. What is always important to remember is that almost everyone working these questions in the Biden White House was working them, usually one or two rungs down, in the bad old Obama days when Netanyahu notoriously plotted with the President’s domestic political enemies but added the deeper indignity of doing it publicly, not even doing him the courtesy of concealment. They all know this guy.

One thing we learn is that Netanyahu and Biden haven’t spoken in almost three weeks, the last time being on December 23rd when Biden cut off the conversation and hung up on him.

None of this is surprising. It was baked into the situation when the original October 7th massacres happened with Netanyahu as Prime Minister. The fact the event itself thoroughly discredited him in Israel just added to the uncanniness of it. To no one’s surprise he continues to put his personal freedom and political survival before all other priorities. It’s time for Biden to make publicly clear that his support for Israel is not support for Netanyahu and that the latter is not only an obstacle to US interests but Israeli ones as well.

Let me go back to things I was writing here at TPM during the Obama years and saying in conversations with people in the Israeli political and defense worlds at the time. For clarity, I don’t put these forth as my views. They were views of many others of the same political perspective. I refer back to it because it sheds light on the layers of acrimony between Netanyahu’s Israel and many of its erstwhile US defenders.

It was galling to many American Jews to see Netanyahu plotting against a President they supported, not to mention the offense of any foreign leader so brazenly meddle in domestic US politics. I’ve mentioned a number of times since October 7th, that it is hard to over-estimate the damage caused by having a generation of Americans learn about Israel through the prism of a long-serving Israeli Prime Minister plotting against a US President they not only supported but viewed as central to their aspirations about America’s future. But beyond the anger over Netanyahu’s open alliance with the US Republican party was an additional point: do you not realize the folly of staking the US-Israel alliance on the most rapidly declining political demographic in American society? How does that work out exactly?

Of course, from the perspective of 2024 it’s not like it’s Democratic majorities as far as the eye can see. But the same gist still applies. At the most basic level many of us predicted in 2014 precisely the dynamic of of the politics of 2024 – young voters, especially progressive voters and people of color, seeing Israel through a much different and less forgiving prism than their parents generation. You’re sowing the seeds of your own undoing and what’s worse you’re going to come crying to us for help when you reap this harvest and we’re not going to be able to provide much. And here we are.

We’re In An Epidemic Of Right-Wing Terror. Won’t Someone Tell The Press?

More than a decade of media malpractice enabled January 6. Has the media learned its lesson?

by Rick Perlstein
January 5, 2024
This article was originally published at In These Times and is reprinted here with permission.

“Violence is a part of America’s culture,” the Black Power militant H. Rap Brown once said. ​“It is as American as cherry pie.”

Another equally American tradition is looking away from the problem when it comes from the Right.

As researchers have repeatedly found, the Right is where political violence in America overwhelmingly originates. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies — an eminently respectable, bipartisan think tank — right-wing political violence accounted for more than 90% of all attacks or plots in the first half of 2020, far outpacing terrorism from any other source since 1990. And since 2020, it’s gotten increasingly worse. A Reuters investigation published in August found that U.S. political violence is worse than it’s been at any point since the 1970s. Of the 18 fatal acts of political terrorism they counted since the Jan. 6 insurrection, only one came from the ​“Left” (involving a Democratic county official who allegedly murdered a reporter investigating him for corruption)...

Last night, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced they have agreed to another continuing resolution that will fund the government until March 1 and March 8. Schumer said he will begin the process of passing the continuing resolution when the Senate reconvenes tomorrow.

The first part of the current continuing resolution that funds the government will run out Friday, and Schumer warned that “[t]o avoid a shutdown, it will take bipartisan cooperation in the Senate and the House to quickly pass the CR and send it to the President's desk before Friday's funding deadline.”

Schumer is sending a message to the House, since far-right Republican extremists there threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of the speakership for adhering to the budget spending agreement he made with President Joe Biden in June 2023. Now Johnson has agreed to what is essentially the same deal.

It is unclear what actions the funding measure will prompt in the House. According to Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell in the Washington Post yesterday, extremist Republicans remain angry enough at their inability to dictate terms to the government that they are, once again, threatening to halt the House’s business in protest, to challenge Johnson’s speakership, and/or to shut down the government. At the same time, other Republicans are angry that Johnson appears to be caving to the extremists, who have made the House a bit of a laughingstock as they made it almost impossible last year for the House to get anything done. More obstruction, another speakership fight, or a government shutdown would hurt the Republicans’ image even more.

Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that Johnson told the House conference that with Kentucky representative Hal Rogers hospitalized after a car accident on Wednesday, and Louisiana representative Steve Scalise out of Congress until February for a stem cell transplant to treat his blood cancer, the Republican majority is so slim there isn’t time for anything other than a continuing resolution.

Perhaps to appease the extremists, on the same call, Sherman reported, Johnson told the conference that the bipartisan immigration measure being negotiated in the Senate was “DOA in House.” House Republicans have insisted they will not pass additional funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan without a measure addressing the border. At the same time, they have also refused Biden’s offer to negotiate, clearly trying to preserve the immigration issue to whip up voters before the 2024 election. Johnson told his conference that Congress “can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected or a Republican is back in the White House.” In Iowa, Trump promised: “As soon as I take the oath of office, I’ll…begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”

We got a taste of what those policies will look like over the weekend when on Friday a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande and two other migrants were in distress after Texas soldiers prevented Border Patrol officers from entering Shelby Park, the area where the migrants were crossing. A lawyer for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote to Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on Sunday, demanding that Texas stop blocking Border Patrol officers.

Meanwhile, the image of the migrant woman and children drowning is so damaging that Texas troops claim they didn’t see any distressed migrants and Texas governor Greg Abbott today insisted that the migrants were already dead when his troops stopped the Border Patrol from helping, although that claim does not address the fact that the Texas troops had blocked the Border Patrol’s normal surveillance of the river and had assumed responsibility for it. Abbott tried to argue that the deaths were not his fault but rather Biden’s because, he said, Biden’s policies encouraged migrants to attempt the crossing.

For their part, Senate Republican negotiators pushed back on the news that Johnson was preemptively tanking the immigration measure, saying that rumors about what’s in it are inaccurate and that Republicans should withhold judgment until they see it. Members of the Senate are eager to pass aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

Today, Nahal Toosi explored in Politico how the domestic political infighting in the United States is undermining faith in American democracy around the world. Toosi explained that current and former diplomats pointed to concerns that U.S. foreign policy will change based on the demands of a radical base, and they pointed to Trump’s abrupt exit in 2018 from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more popularly known as the Iran nuclear agreement, that significantly restricted Iran’s nuclear development. In the wake of that withdrawal, Iran resumed the previously prohibited uranium enrichment.

“Foreign relations is very much based on trust, and when you know that the person that is in front of you may not be there or might be followed by somebody that feels exactly the opposite way, what is your incentive to do long-term deals?” a former Latin American diplomat asked of Toosi. A former Mexican ambassador told Toosi that if a Republican takes the White House in 2024, countries will not be able to trust the U.S. as a partner but will instead operate transactionally.

“The world does not have time for the U.S. to rebound back,” a former Asian ambassador told Toosi. “We’ve gone from a unipolar world that we’re familiar with from the 1990s into a multipolar world, but the key pole is still the United States. And if that key pole is not playing the role that we want the U.S. to do, you’ll see alternative forces coming up.” Toosi noted that Russian diplomats were “among those delighting in the U.S. chaos (and fanning it).”

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: I just have to get to business just for a second. At this point in the evening the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech. We will keep an eye on that as it happens, we will let you know if there is any news made in that speech, anything noteworthy, something substantive and important.

The reason why I am saying this is, of course, there is a reason that we and other news organizations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered, live platform to remarks by former President Trump. It's not out of spite, it is not a decision that we relish, it is a decision that we regularly revisit and, honestly, earnestly, it is not an easy decision. But there is a cost to us, as a news organization, of knowingly broadcasting untrue things. And that is a fundamental truth of our business and who we are. So his remarks, tonight, will not air here live. We will monitor them and let you know about any news that he makes.

Nearly half of the voters chose someone else.

Quote:

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: I just have to get to business just for a second. At this point in the evening the projected winner of the Iowa caucuses has just started giving his victory speech. We will keep an eye on that as it happens, we will let you know if there is any news made in that speech, anything noteworthy, something substantive and important.

The reason why I am saying this is, of course, there is a reason that we and other news organizations have generally stopped giving an unfiltered, live platform to remarks by former President Trump. It's not out of spite, it is not a decision that we relish, it is a decision that we regularly revisit and, honestly, earnestly, it is not an easy decision. But there is a cost to us, as a news organization, of knowingly broadcasting untrue things. And that is a fundamental truth of our business and who we are. So his remarks, tonight, will not air here live. We will monitor them and let you know about any news that he makes.

Or, maybe they have learned.

Biden’s popularity in the low to mid-30s now?